Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Island of Misfit Toys

Human Torch, Mercuryboy and I are all pretty avid golfers. And we're all pretty new to the game. This leads to a couple things: plenty of mediocre golfing (as you've heard) and a lot of club buying.

In Roman and Greek times, they made sacrifices to the gods for all kinds of things: good weather on a journey; good favor in the new franchise of 3-Day Toga Broker they were planning to open up; or just another day of good health, hard work, healthy food, and a hearty barf session to top it all off. It looked something like this:

Now, the Romans in particular got wise and made a pretty good business out of this. If you stood outside the Fabulous Forum in ancient Rome (later renamed the Great Western Empire Forum), sacrifice bait could be bought from hundreds of chicken, pigeon, pig and weasel vendors. It was like a farmer's market, but way, way bloodier.

Anyway, if they had had golf, surely there would have been an entire section of the market devoted to golf sacrifices. What would you have to kill for par on a single hole? A cricket? Or would you need to go up to mouse for that? Sadly, that knowledge is lost in the mists of time.

For us, though we don't kill animals (except that time with HT and the squirrel), the sacrifice is money. Buying new clubs, in hopes of replacing old ones and getting favor from the golf gods, is about as useful as taking a pile of money and burning it outside the Forum, or even the Staples Center.

So there's a lot of club buying, which means a lot of club dumping. Where do these abandoned clubs go?

To the Island of Misfit Toys.

This is the forlorn collection of clubs that the three of us have "retired."

Which leads me to today's contest.

The first person (other than Human Torch) who can name one of the misfit toys from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" gets his or her pick of any club (some of them are pretty good) from the Island of Misfit Toys. Plus a pastry to be named later.

If you're not local, I'll send you a picture, and you can pick one that I'll ship to you.